To better understand their own partnership and help others in partnerships, student/faculty partners often write reflective essays about their experiences.
Since 2010, the journal Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education (TLTHE) has served as a forum for the reflective work of college faculty and students working together to explore and enact effective classroom practice. Published three times per year, the journal is premised on the centrality to successful pedagogy of dialogue and collaboration among faculty and students in explorations and revisions of approaches to teaching and learning in higher education.
On this page, we provide summaries of the issues of the journal to date. Clicking the title of the issue will take you to the issue’s homepage, where you can browse the articles in that issue.
2010
Issue 1 (Fall): Introduction
“This inaugural issue of Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education documents three of the emerging themes that animate a pedagogy of mutual engagement: reflection and sustained dialogue, inquiry, and collaboration. Faculty members and students alike recognize the pedagogical power of conversation.”
2011
Issue 2 (Winter): Enacting a Pedagogy of Mutual Engagement
“In the first issue of Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, Advisory Board member Dennis Thiessen suggested that we might understand the work of teaching and learning together in higher education as embracing a ‘pedagogy of mutual engagement.’ He argued that such a pedagogy is animated by “reflection and sustained dialogue, inquiry, and collaboration.” The reciprocity and mutually enriching premise of such a notion invites us to rethink in profound ways the relationships between faculty and students and the relationship both have to higher education. The contributions to this issue offer various examples of such a rethinking. In this introduction I refer to Thiessen’s argument to illustrate how each contribution enacts a pedagogy of mutual engagement.”
Issue 3 (Spring): Teaching and Learning Relationships
In this issue, “contributors continue to complicate and disrupt expectations, pursue more humanizing and affirming forms of educational practice, and both enact and call for deeper, more demanding pedagogical approaches and ways of life. Placing relationships at the center of teaching and learning demands from teachers and students the taking up of a certain kind of accountability. Not the kind that counts accomplishments in some quantifiable and reductive way but rather one that makes both parties responsible (able and willing to act not only in response to others but also out of their own initiative) and answerable for their actions.”
Issue 4 (Fall): Learning in Parallel, Learning in Partnership
“In this issue, we focus on the ways that mutual engagement fosters parallel processes of individual and shared learning. Rather than pit mutual benefit and individual gain against one another, these essays throw into relief how collaborative work between faculty and students not only builds more productive and satisfying pedagogical relationships but also contributes to the clarification of the partners’
respective commitments and goals. The learning that unfolds in relationship at once sharpens individual insight and contributes to perspective in the sense of depth perception or wide-angle view — perception informed by more than one angle of vision.”
2012
Issue 5 (Winter): A Teaching and Learning Center Creates New Opportunities for Faculty…And Students
“This introduction and the essays that follow are thus very personally as well as institutionally significant. They tell multiple stories of how we have, through our work within the Center and, in particular, through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, come to develop a sharp focus on student learning and, beyond that, student participation in designing and analyzing learning opportunities.”
Issue 6: Behind the Scenes — How TLI Partnerships Unfold
“The nine contributions to this issue offer glimpses into the media through which TLI partnerships unfold: detailed, classroom observation notes student consultants complete for their faculty
partners; email exchanges between faculty members and student consultants; weekly planning and reflection sessions through which faculty members and their student consultants confer, plan, and revise a course the faculty member is teaching; and blog entries posted by faculty members during the semester when they participate in TLI forums. Each essay offers reflections on how
these and other forms of exchange between faculty members and student consultants inform both classroom practices and, more generally, communication in teaching and learning in higher
education. These behind-the-scenes glimpses serve to highlight themes that recur across faculty–student partnerships: the importance of expanded perspectives, the power of partnership to
increase confidence, the centrality of dialogue — both listening and transparency — to good communication, and the potential of gratitude to humanize and bolster the work of teaching and learning.”
Issue 7 (Fall): Faculty-Student Collaboration in Developing an Innovative College-wide Program
The nine contributions to this issue offer glimpses into the complex relationships, processes, and approaches participants in the inaugural 360s took to developing this new program. Each essay offers short descriptions of the 360 course cluster and the particular courses included in it, analyses of the ways in which student consultants worked with faculty as they developed, taught, and assessed the 360 courses, and particular experiences and insights gained through those collaborations. Particularly striking about these discussions is the insight they offer into how to help make clusters of courses coherent, as opposed to how to make a single course work on its own. This shift in focus, informed to a great extent by the work of the student consultants, has implications beyond the 360 program: all students are striving for such a balance, if not integration, all the time, and faculty and administrators will benefit from understanding this student experience and perspective in thinking about higher education overall.
2013
Issue 8 (Winter): Growing Deep Learning
“Only students with a deep approach will seek meaning lying behind the page, explore its implication, applications, and possibilities. They will begin to theorize from what they learn, and that learning will have a profound influence on the way they subsequently think, act, and feel. In some powerful research, several scholars have found that only students with deep intentions will be able to use the best advice on how to study, learn, and prosper in an academic environment…In a variety of circumstances, our contributors explore ways to resolve these tensions. They find answers in engaging questions they raise with students, attractive invitations they issue (including the invitation to explore), and the purposes they invoke for their enterprise.”
Issue 9 (Spring): Crossing Thresholds Together
“Threshold concepts act, by definition, like doorways; crossing a particular threshold enables significant new disciplinary learning, often learning that was impossible before. Mastering a threshold concept not only allows the learner to grasp important disciplinary material, but it also reshapes how the learner sees other aspects of the world…This special issue of Teaching and Learning Together In Higher Education reflects something different because the writing here comes from faculty and students who have worked together at Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College to explore threshold concepts in action.”
Issue 10 (Fall): Respect, Reciprocity, and Responsibility in Developing Participatory Cultures and Practices
“Respect, reciprocity, and responsibility are essential qualities of the partnerships featured in the essays included in this issue of Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education. In both formal and informal partnerships that cross traditional lines of role and accountability, these three interdependent qualities of partnership inform the development of participatory cultures and practices…The five contributions to this issue offer diverse explorations of how teachers and students in different positions and across different contexts can come together to collaborate and explore, both redefining participation and offering glimpses into the experiences of those involved in that redefinition.”
2014
Issue 11 (Winter): Realizing the Potential of Partnerships Between First-Year Faculty and Undergraduate Student Consultants
“This issue of Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education features the reflections of six new faculty members who have taken up the opportunity to partner with student consultants in their first year and of five student consultants who have worked in partnership with these or other new faculty. Each of these contributors offers his or her own unique story and analysis of this experience, some focusing on the dynamics of the partnership, others focusing on the insights they gained into their own particular pedagogical commitments or key aspects of the teaching-learning relationship, and still others on the intersection of a number of these foci. While the theme of this issue is supporting new faculty in their first year of teaching, the student essays illuminate how this approach to faculty development is also enriching and empowering to the student consultants in the partnerships.”
Issue 12 (Spring): Toward a Theory of Academic Self Awareness
“This special issue of Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education explores the possibilities of ‘academic self-awareness’: how we feel, choose, and act when we deliberately take in, take ownership of, and re-circulate knowledge in and beyond the college classroom. Our goal is to shed light on the pressures that accompany the learning process—pressures that are too often acted out, ignored, or overcome, but, when articulated and lingered with, can themselves become material for self-analysis.”
Issue 13 (Fall): Digging Deeper into Partnership: The Stories Behind the Cases in Engaging Students as Partners in Learning & Teaching
“These essays are engaging not only for the stories they tell but also for the questions they raise about the inspiration behind and the challenges of partnership. Themes highlighted in Engaging Students as Partners in Learning & Teaching are elaborated here: how, through partnership, students sometimes doubt their capacities at first and then empower themselves; faculty sometimes find their assumptions about teaching and learners challenged; and both students and teachers develop new insights, capacities, and commitments. The overarching theme of these essays is the potential for transformation, and the essays detail what forms such transformation can take.”
2015
Issue 14 (Winter): Partnership in Teacher Education
“We are living in an age of collaboration—an age in which working with others is not only important but actually crucial to our collective success. Hierarchies of all kinds are being questioned, and the notion that one group holds all of the answers has been largely rejected. This Winter 2015 issue offers several examples of how these realities can play out in innovative approaches to teacher education. Across all seven essays, the same themes surface again and again: the centrality of relationship; the power of reciprocal teaching and learning; the importance of affirmation; the commitment to lifelong learning. While these themes and principles might be expected in discussions of partnership, how they are put into practice varies according to context, participants, and goals.”
Issue 15 (Spring): Extended Student-Faculty Partnerships: Deepening Insights, Transforming Relationships
“Each year between one quarter and one half of the faculty participants who work in partnerships with student consultants during their first semester request support to continue in such partnership during a second semester. Recognizing the power of continued reflection and dialogue with a student who is not enrolled in their courses and who has developed extensive knowledge of their pedagogical values and approaches, faculty members want to hold open the space within which they can collaborate with students in these ways. The deepening of insights and the transformation of relationships fostered by these extended partnerships is the focus of this issue of Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education.”
Issue 16 (Fall): Developing Student-Faculty Partnerships at Bridgewater State University
This special issue was written by faculty at Bridgewater State University. The authors of the introduction write, “If we consider how the development of student/faculty partnerships fits into the larger picture of faculty development and student engagement on our campus, we start with faculty development that asks us to design experiences to engage students in our classes. But there comes a moment when you are going down that path where, if you really mean it, you suddenly cede the perfect control you have over the learning environment and invite your students in, invite them to not simply be engaged but also to design and redesign what that engagement looks like.”
2016
Issue 17 (Winter): Collaborating to Develop and Improve Classroom Teaching: Student-Consultant for Teaching and Learning Program at Reed College
“In this special issue, faculty-student pairs [at Reed College] consider ways that a faculty member can develop and improve their teaching, by having the courage to risk trying new pedagogy and opening one’s self up to (possibly negative) feedback, by listening to a student partner’s and a classroom of students’ perspectives, and by engaging actively in collaboration around teaching goals.”
Issue 18 (Spring): Creating Brave Spaces within and through Student/Faculty Pedagogical Partnerships
“Three undergraduate students and two incoming faculty members who participated in the Students as Learners and Teachers (SaLT) program at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges highlight how they experienced and created brave spaces—spaces in which they felt courageous enough to risk, explore, experiment, assert, learn, and change, knowing that they would be supported in those necessarily
destabilizing and unpredictable processes. These essays describe how student-faculty pedagogical partnerships themselves constitute brave spaces and/or how such partnerships support the creation of brave spaces in classrooms.”
Issue 19 (Fall): Mentoring and Supervision Reconceived as Partnership
“Mentoring and supervision typically connote unidirectional oversight and guidance. Although the goal of both processes is to support and nurture a less experienced or younger colleague, the underlying premise is that it is only that person who is doing the learning. The
essays in this issue complicate these standard assumptions about mentoring and supervision and offer different models for these
processes. These models create new roles for all participants and allow them to build relationships based on principles of respect for what each person in the relationship brings, reciprocity in what is taught and what is learned, and shared responsibility for teaching and
learning. In short, they reconceive of mentoring and supervision as partnership.”
2017
Issue 20 (Winter): Student-Faculty Partnership in Italy: Approaches, Practices, and Perspectives
“This collection of essays offers, first of all, the opportunity to address the strongly felt need for supplying a clear theoretical and methodological approach to those educational practices that are
flourishing in Italy according to a “student voice” approach, oriented towards developing partnerships between students and teachers. In addition, it has allowed using a “student voice” lens to view other initiatives, not necessarily born according to the methodological criteria of this approach, but which soon became established as their supporters.”
Issue 21 (Spring): Students and Staff as Partners in Australian Higher Education
“The essays in this special issue reveal a diversity of lived experiences and reflective insights with fruitful implications for others engaging in, or considering, partnership. […] All these essays present real issues facing those of us in Australia as we enact partnership practices, and reminds us of the importance of networks to support such uncertain and creative work that does not come with a step-by-step ‘how-to’ guide.”
Issue 22 (Fall): How Pedagogical Partnerships Can Build a Sense of Belonging, Create a Trusting Classroom Community, and Spark Hope
“Expanding on the idea of brave spaces explored in issue 18 of Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, the essays in this issue focus on building a sense of belonging, trust, and hope through being meaningfully present to and affirming of one another in partnership.”
2018
Issue 23 (Winter): The Transformative Potential of Pedagogical Partnership: A Sampling of Student Partners’ Stories
“This issue of Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education brings stories of student partners’ transformations to a wider audience. It was inspired by some of the powerful reflections student
partners shared that evoked their experiences of pedagogical partnership in ways that more distanced descriptions cannot capture. The authors of these essays have all worked in one or more semester-long, one-on-one partnerships with faculty members at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, but each partnership was different and each student partner experienced his or her own form(s) of transformation.”
Issue 24 (Spring): Exploring Dimensions of Risk in Pedagogical Partnerships in Higher Education
“The selected essays begin to respond to some of these questions by drawing explicit attention to, and reflecting upon, dimensions of risk in pedagogical partnerships in a variety of contexts, ranging from the micro (classroom level within the university) to the mega level (national and international policy contexts). Issues of choice and agency, positionality, identity, precarity, and prioritization are discussed, revealing some of the fears and tensions within partnership work that are often under-explored (or under-reported) in current literature. The contributions are by no means fatalistic accounts. By discussing risk within partnerships, as well as the broader context of the academy and personal lives, the authors offer examples of vulnerability and bravery, of risk-taking and trust-building, and of choice-taking and ally-making.”
Issue 25 (Fall): Playing with Partnership Approaches in Higher Education
“This collection of essays has come from a range of staff and students who have played around with partnership ideas at Massey University, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa, in New Zealand. They present a range of ideas, assessment practices, and approaches—pedagogical approaches through student-staff partnerships that they have been playing with—in attempts to create new possibilities to ensure their students enjoy learning as a creative endeavor, and in doing so, they have been transformed as teachers and educators.”
2019
Issue 26 (Winter): Becoming: Realizing Selves through Participating in Pedagogical Partnership
“The stories of becoming—of realizing selves—included in this issue focus on the two senses of “realize”: to become aware of and to
make happen. They are six stories of how student consultants in the Students as Learners and Teachers (SaLT) program at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges became aware of themselves and their processes of development and brought into being new versions of those selves. Each story captures the way in which such becoming and such realizing are complex intersections of intention and accident, choice and circumstance.”
Issue 27 (Spring): Wrestling with the Languages and Practices of Pedagogical Partnership
“The essays in this issue wrestle in thoughtful ways with what it means to recognize, name, make real, and reconsider the practices of pedagogical partnership and how those practices affect and
are affected by who participates and where they are located. Each addresses the theme of this issue in a different way: as a meditation on telling true partnership stories informed by insights across time and context; as an exploration of the potential of an embrace of partnership in an Eastern context; and as a personal and professional narrative of coming to realizations about positions, identities, and ways of naming in a Western context.”
Issue 28 (Fall): Gaining Perspective on Inclusion: What Faculty See in What Students See
“The five essays in this issue, all written by faculty, share inspiring approaches to identifying sources of exclusion and working toward greater inclusion, and they also highlight the perspective faculty can gain when they engage in dialogue and reflection with student partners focused on equity and inclusion: what faculty see in what students see. The essays also include student partners’ reflections on the importance of such gaining of perspective. But beyond—or maybe beneath—perspective, which is so essential to this work, is human connection. These essays reveal how student and faculty partners connected as people, cared for one another, provided the space and support to do the hard emotional as well as intellectual and structural work of striving toward greater equity and inclusion.”
2020
Issue 29 (Winter): Moving Toward Pedagogical Partnership
“Just like pedagogical partnership itself, the ways in which people move toward such partnership vary considerably. The essays in this issue include an example of moving toward pedagogical partnership at the programmatic level within a single institution and an example of supporting movement toward partnership across institutions. Essays also analyze how a student partner moved toward deeper partnership within an established partnership program and how a student partner imagined and pursued what partnership might look like beyond that same partnership program. Finally, another essay narrates how a faculty member worked to re-imagine grading
within a course as more of a partnership with students.”
Issue 30 (Summer): Naming and Navigating Troubling Transitions: Pedagogical Partnership during the Pandemic
“This issue includes six essays, each of which tells a different story of transition. Each asks us to think more expansively about what we
might have considered “normal” ways of being and what transitions from those can catalyze in theory and practice. The essays were written in the summer of 2020, after everyone had
weathered the emergent transition to remote teaching and learning and in anticipation of what we all may become as we move forward. They offer inspiring glimpses of alternatives to “getting back to normal,” which seems neither possible nor desirable. Each essay in this collection takes up the theme of naming and navigating troubling transitions, and each names experiences differently.”
Issue 31 (Fall): The Nesting Doll of Student-Staff Partnerships: Meaningful Collaborations through Unique Experiences
“This special issue showcases the work of five student-staff teams who presented their work at the ‘Towards Meaningful Partnerships: Student-Staff Collaborations to Enhance Learning and Teaching across the Disciplines’ symposium at the University of Surrey, UK, in September 2019. The essays in this issue differ in scope and discipline, but one of the defining features they have in common is their dedication to improving the student learning experience at their
respective institutions. The authors showcase the stories of their partnerships through sharing details of their respective projects, delving into all that worked and what they found difficult. What results is a snapshot of what it means to work in the thick of partnership, and sometimes between the lines of the definitions found in literature.”
2021
Issue 32 (Winter): What It Means to Work in Partnership at Northeastern University
“This special issue features essays from 8 faculty, students, and staff at Northeastern University. Despite the variety of experiences represented by the essays in this issue, common themes emerge. Multiple faculty authors use the works “disorienting” and “invigorating” to describe relaxing control in their roles as experts. Students speak of being initially uncertain that they are qualified to make substantive contributions, and acknowledge that having their ideas included in the work was a turning point in their sense of partnership. Of note is students’ use of phrases that indicate a sense of ownership (e.g. “our work”). Several of the essays discuss the challenges for faculty of flattening traditional hierarchical relationships in partnership projects, with multiple acknowledgments of the need for faculty to provide appropriate preparation and initial leadership to scaffold students’ abilities to succeed as substantive partners.”
Issue 33 (Spring): When Students Take Leadership Roles in Launching Pedagogical Partnership Initiatives
“In this issue, eight students tell their stories of taking on leadership roles in the development of pedagogical partnership initiatives at liberal arts colleges and research universities in four US states and Pakistan. These institutions—Davidson College, Vassar College, Tufts University, Syracuse University, and Lahore University of Management Sciences—constitute diverse contexts for student leaders who must navigate seeking to be heard and respected in places that also have invalidated them and others they represent. This approach to student leadership […] positions student leaders—and those with whom they collaborate—to disrupt structures and practices that perpetuate inattention and inequity and to model and encourage dialogue and co-creation of pedagogical approaches among students, faculty, and staff.”
Issue 34 (Fall): Developing Agentic Engagement through and across Pedagogical Partnership Programs
This issue includes ten essays written by student partners working at four different universities in the United States, the National University of Singapore, at University of Hong Kong, University of Queensland, and at Lahore University of Management Sciences. Student authors analyze their various experiences of agentic engagement within and beyond partnership.
2022
Issue 35 (Fall): Launching a Pedagogical Partnership Program at Emmanuel College
This issue, guest edited by student partner and external facilitator, Nandeeta Bala, includes several essays that describe participants’ experiences of developing CLIP (Community Learning & Inclusivity Partnership) at Emmanuel College, CLIP partnership work focuses on making courses more inclusive: faculty partners volunteer their classes for the program, and their student accessibility consultants attend and observe their classes for inclusivity, accessibility, and student voice and involvement.
Issue 36 (Spring): Developing Pedagogical Partnership at Vassar College
This issue, guest edited by student partner and external facilitator, Nandeeta Bala, includes several essays that describe participants’ experiences of developing STEPP (Student Teacher Engaged Pedagogical Partnership) at Vassar College. It includes Bala’s introduction and three essays by faculty and student participants in STEPP.
Issue 37 (Fall): Pedagogical Partnership at Tufts University
Guest edited by Ryan Rideau, former director of the P3 Program at Tufts University, this collection of essays by faculty, staff, and student partners offers insight into the experiences of pedagogical partnership at Tufts.
2023
Issue 38 (Winter): Learning and Unlearning through Pedagogical Partnership
This issue includes seven essays, each of which explores in its own way the power of learning and unlearning through pedagogical
partnership. Such work entails deepening knowledge, skills, and inquiries and dislodging from settled concepts and
practices. The authors of these essays engage in courageous and humble ways in analyzing the power dynamics always at play in the workings of higher education and in efforts to re-imagine
that education.
Issue 39 (Spring): Exploring the Development of Pedagogical Partnerships in Asian Contexts
Includes six essays that explore what developing partnership approaches in selected universities in China, Singapore, and Pakistan entails, both the complexities and the possibilities.
Issue 40 (Fall): Fostering Inclusive Learning Communities Together
Guest edited by Vincent C. H. Tong, this Special Issue includes 27 short contributions from Northumbria University’s institution-wide project aimed at advancing inclusive education through student-led
collaborative scholarship.
Issue 41 (Winter): Pedagogical Partnerships: Creating and Cultivating Authentic Relationships in Minority-Serving Institutions
Guest edited by Kate Zimmer and Patricia Alvarez McHatton, this issue featured essays of four pairs of student-faculty partners from Minority-Serving Institutions who participated in a Pedagogical Partnership Project sponsored by Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity, or BranchED.